Dreaming of India
by Anna Jaquiery
On this morning like all others, this middling route I take each day
Half-hearted as the overcast sky mulling over rain,
A bevy of Indian school girls gets on the tram
white shirt collars, white teeth against dark skin,
The gold studs on their lobes you can almost taste.
With their chatter, their tousled glow this workaday morning they
Disarrange our dull expressions, our earphones and newspapers,
Our inverted worlds.
I rest my head against the windowsill,
Feel the heat on my face, my heart beats crescendo like the
Quickening of fingers, in my mind
The sun is a raga unfurling
The girls’ laughter through closed lids
Is the accompanist’s clapping of hands.
At the next stop they head off
In a jumble of white socks and matchstick shins,
And for a beat or two, I am propelled by
A balloon surge of happiness.
Bio: Anna Jaquiery was born in France and is of French-Indian descent.She has worked as a journalist for a number of newspapers and international wire agencies including the Associated Press and Bloomberg, mostly across Europe and Asia. Her work has recently appeared in various places such as Skive, Adagio Verse Quarterly, Invisible Ink Poetry Journal, Glossolalia, Flash international magazine and the Asia Literary Review. She lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband and two sons.
Amateur Astrology
by William Doreski
After a glossy day of smiles
and candor I’m driving home
under a smut of plotting stars.
You believe their allegories,
you claim, but I find the wind
sculpting the dark more persuasive
than arbitrary cosmic patterns.
But you’ve taken your doughy grin
home to squalling children and husband
squat as a kumquat. You’ll force
yourself to write another chapter
of the Spanish textbook you’re crafting
to please your gloomy publisher.
We’ve never conjugated verbs
in exactly the same manner.
You slip into the pluperfect
while I cling to the simple feast.
As for astrology: I insist
the malevolence of starlight roots
in human psychology, not
in the bad dreams of a deity.
Often I’ve sulked by a starlit pond
and let the rage pour through me
like an evil prescription drug.
You. however, never face the stars
you claim to analyze so clearly.
You hunker over charts and whisper
in Spanish so your husband will think
you’re invoking a long-lost lover.
Then you decide which planets enact
which constellations, imposing
moods and manias according
to our various moments of birth.
The dark hills absorb the starlight
with no ill effect. I drive with care,
watching for animals that lurk
bright-eyed by the roadside, the sky
too tall to worry me, the forest
looming like an unspoken thought.
Bio: William Doreski's work has appeared online and in several collections, most recently, Waiting for the Angel(Pygmy Forest Press)
The Dogs
by Peycho Kanev
Sitting in this dingy room
in front of the keyboard
as the moon light penetrates
through the venetian blinds
as the bottle of white wine
pours the life into me
as the walls shift and get
darker.
I am picking at the memories
and let them unfold in front of
me; I remember now two years ago
visiting the country of my birth
in Eastern Europe
and what I’ve remembered most
were the dogs on the streets;
free and undisturbed, no owners,
no collars, no worries, no food,
lying in the parks, sleeping on
the grass between the highways,
picking at the garbage bins for
scraps, chasing the cats in the
alleys, taking they time, biting
the legs of the pedestrians and
at night when it’s quiet outside-
wailing at the moon;
why they do that I will never
know,
but know as this memory bites
the whiteness of the page,
one wail is blasting upon this
sleepy neighborhood, causing
the city dwellers to jump off
their beds.
my throat is sore.
Bio:Peycho Kanev is 28 years old. He loves to listen to sad music while he drinks slowly his beer. His work has been published in Welter, Gloom Cupboard, Off Beat Pulp, Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review, Outsider Writers, Mad Swirl, Side of Grits, Southern Ocean Review, The Houston Literary Review and many others. He loves to put the word down and not talking on the cell phone for days. He is nominated for a Pushcart Award. He lives in Chicago. His new collaborative collection "r", containing poetry by him and Felino Soriano, as well as photography from Duane Locke and Edward Wells II is now available at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/r-Peycho-Kanev/dp/0979129494/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245429788&sr=1-1
Goldfish Hangover
by KJ Hannah Greenberg
Pillow. Parkway. Pillow. Parkway.
Gassed up, I motor
North mean jobs or chump change.
One bleary eye,
I smile for classes,
Yesterday’s Scotch and Soda,*
Left in glasses,
Alongside a friend.
Little aquatic, Mr. Gilded Gills,
Sagacious lord of clear utopia,
Your little fishy dance and
Forsaken silence spangled
All night.
Afterwards, I did not discharge,
Choosing, instead,
Asphyxiation,
On the alleged
Goodness of the invisible.
Our harmonic music vanquished,
I, too, am stilled.
You, an extension of my heart
Have been snuffed out
In a cocktail cup.
* “Scotch and Soda” is the name of a drama association in Pittsburgh.
Bio: KJ Hannah Greenberg is a columnist for Britain’s The Mother Magazine, a blogger for Israel’s The Jerusalem Post, a fiction and flash fiction reviewer for Bewildering Stories, and a nonfiction and poetry reviewer for Sotto Voce. Her work has been published in dozens of venues world wide, from Australia’s Language and Culture Magazine and Antipodean SF, to Israel’s Fallopian Falafel, to the UK’s Morpheus Tales and to the USA’s Poetica and The Externalist.She keeps her hibernaculum of imaginary hedgehogs trim by making them do push-ups and keeps herself in shape by matchmaking words like “twaddle” and “xylophone.”
